“He is poor today, but not because one has taken everything away from him; he has thrown away everything. What is that to him? He is used to finding things. It is the poor who misunderstand his voluntary poverty.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche.
There was a general, nationwide
boycott called Friday, February 28. Described as a 24-hour “economic blackout”
by activist group People’s Union USA, it was promoted in the mainstream media
as a protest against “the malign influence of billionaires, big corporations
and both major political parties on the lives of working Americans.” Right on.
I heard about it the same day that the Washington Post opinion pages
story broke.1 How appropriate, seeing that Amazon is the anti-christ
of retail.
I didn’t know about the boycott
until it was already half-over Friday afternoon while absently scrolling online
headlines during downtime at my job (at the public middle school, Special Ed).
Maybe that’s what I get for not having any ‘social media’ accounts. (I
unplugged all of them the day after Snowden went public.) Anyway, missing the
news wasn’t a problem for me. I wasn’t planning to buy anything that day.
And I had only a few minutes earlier printed up some flyers (on the school copier) which read (in 175 pt. helvetica) Don’t Buy It. That’s been my slogan for the last few weeks. I like to stick these messages in those ‘free weekly’ boxes which litter the college-town boutique downtown where I live. Give the yoga yuppies something to mull on the way back to their Teslas.
Fuck the fascist economy! As I see
it, it wasn’t Vietnam or Watergate that brought Nixon down, it was the lousy
economy. Although Trump gets a lot of sheep support from xenophobia, it’s
supposedly inflation that got him elected. Good luck with that, loudmouth. The
way Trump zig-zags on pet trade positions as the stock market rises and falls
shows his vulnerability to the electorate, stupid as it may be. Deporting all
the landscapers and hotel maids in ‘America’ (as if the United States is all of
America) is one thing, the sticker shock of a dozen crummy eggs is another.
Which brings me to the other loudmouth, Musk.
Maybe this prick is now so wealthy he doesn’t care anymore about taking care of business. I say this because I live in a neighborhood where a lot of HARRIS WALZ signs are situated right next to Teslas in the driveway. Lawyers, university professors, architects, self-actualized soccer Moms high on Maslow’s Pyramid. The people with Make America Green Again bumperstickers. Maybe I shouldn’t try to speak for these folks ~ since I don’t own a house or a car (I’m 65) ~ but I suspect they rue having such a conspicuous symbol of oppression parked in their bougee driveways. There are rocks nearby. Maybe even bozos protesting DOGE on X are beginning to wise up. Stop making that fascist creep rich!2
I met a protester the other day, a real Pete Seeger type. His slogan was “Stop the Coup. Defend Democratic Institutions.” I asked him how exactly I might go about ‘defend[ing] democratic institutions.’ Like, something I might do when I got off work. He “hadn’t got that far yet” he admitted. Maybe that’s what happens when there’s an election that went so horribly wrong. I later saw a recent post on ZNet, deploring the threatened dismantling of the federal Dept. of Education. It passionately concluded, “We must build robust, independent, social movements and fight to teach the truth.” What precisely is this “building” and “teaching” I ask. As an employee of a (unionless) public school, one ad lib out of me and I’m pink-slipped.
As a public education (grades 6,7 and 8) prole, I see the future generation in process, and what’s obvious to me on a daily basis is that ‘fighting capitalism’ (something teenagers in the 1970s paid lip service to) is over. There is no fight. Capitalism won. Today’s kids have no problem with Questioning Authority ~ that is, their low-wage babysitters. They question racism (for the most part). And (to a limited extent) they question homophobia. Many even question The President. Cool. But the view from here is: Nobody questions iPhones. Nobody questions cars. Nobody questions fast fashions. Nobody questions Doritos. Nobody questions Disney. Nobody questions Amazon. We’re going to jail, like it or not. All that remains is resisting arrest.
That’s why I go with Don’t Buy It. It isn’t some overwhelming, intimidating feat. It doesn’t require waiting around for a picketing army to mobilize. Just passing on a box of Easter candy or skipping dinner out gives a little instant pushback to the Man, Didn’t the Civil Rights movement start with a bus boycott? I’m confident that if Rosa Parks could hoof it to work for over a year, anarchists, ‘anti-fascists’ and Leftists ~ maybe even liberals! ~ could live without X and Amazon Prime for a little while. Maybe forever!3 Today’s villains are very visible: Trump and the Big Tech support he now receives.4 Bring their economy down and the capitalist rats will throw Trump to the curb.5
It’s true that the Montgomery
boycott was powered by resentment of a directly racist population and a
desire to assimilate into the status quo of American life. We all want
an equal opportunity to melt the Arctic! We all got rights to exploit ‘Third World’ labor! Boycotting today’s fascist
economy, sticking it to Musk and Trump (and Bezos) however, is more like protesting
personal affluence. It is protesting our short-sided destruction of the global
climate. It is protesting air-conditioners. It is protesting laptops.
It is protesting next-day deliveries. It is protesting our consumerist addictions.
It calls for Protesting Yourself. Yes, everybody knows the richest bastards are gobbling up almost all the resources. The disparity statistics are shocking (and easy enough to locate). But I don’t entirely subscribe to the morality tale that climate disaster, like capitalism, is some evil plot concocted by a corporate board of Frankenstein shareholders ~ even though some of these assholes plan to wreck the planet then split (either to privatized islands or other planets, as Douglas Ruskoff warns in Survival of the Richest). Do-gooder Matthew Desmond asks (in Poverty, By America), “‘The system’ doesn’t force us to stiff the waiter or vote against affordable housing in our neighborhood, does it?” By the same logic, ‘the system’ doesn’t force us to stare at Xbox and eat Cheetos all day either. The customer is always right. I don’t agree with the narcissistic cop-out thesis that people (especially those I disagree with) have been brainwashed and everything is somebody else’s fault.
I agree with Jonathan Safron Foer (We Are the Weather) when he says, “[C]ompanies commit crimes on our behalf.”
We ~ and here I am directly
addressing my own (more or less) white, middle-class, educated demographic ~
count on our own bogey-men (and the ‘system’ they embody) to do our dirty
work. Then we go online to protest our proxies (and the ‘system’ they
embody). I don’t accept that I’m that helpless. I don’t accept that I’m so
innocent. I don’t buy it. I am responsible for my own addictions. And my uneasy
complicity. This ‘system’ I claim to hate so much, it’s been keeping me (more
or less) comfortable.6 I mean, here I am, sitting in front of a
computer, kvetching and bitching into the void in my recreational time (just
like you). I’m not especially worried about my toilet. Or heat. Or dinner. I
have the luxury to feel guilty, and outraged.
Here’s the money shot. Who among us
isn’t hypocritical? Capitalism forces even its most ardent critics into
contradictory positions daily. We all know our eggs come from concentration
camps and our old iPods pile up carcinogenic mountains in New Delhi. The surest
method to reduce global warming (as Vince Beiser points out in Power Metal)
is not eating animals (50% of greenhouse emissions). Then there’s owning
a car (15% emissions), yet less than 10% of us do. Hey, no judgment! No shortage of excuses!
Then there’s our internet addiction. Every time we bitch on X, we’re funneling
revenue to the planet’s richest fascist, as well as melting the planet with
more air-conditioning. As Ronald J. Deibert notes in Reset, “Each time
you swipe, text, or search, in your own small way you are contributing to a
planet-wide syndrome that risks our survival as a species.” And apparently somebody
thinks Jeff Bezos deserves better profits. Free shipping! Every time we
have a ‘grass-fed’ burger, or drive to the grocery store, we’re cooking up new
wildfires and hurricanes as we generate more carbon confetti which almost
everyone knows gets ‘recycled’ into the ocean. And
later seeps into our lungs.
The sad, scary truth of the matter
is our slovenly, selfish addiction denial (and commensurate lifestyle) is
eroding someone else’s conscientious, modest life. With every mile we drive,
we’re hacking down someone’s tree. With every cheeseburger we eat, we made some
species of bird extinct. With every YouTube clip we watch, we started another
wildfire in California.7 With another bottled water, more dead zone
in the Gulf of America (née Mexico). Another lithium battery, more cancer in
Delhi. I am your flooded basement. And you are my ingested microplastic. We
don’t even know one another!
The problem is addiction economy. Remember smoking? Like, how we would puff away, fully cognizant that smoking causes lung cancer and other associated bummers ~ such as poisoning our children with second-hand cancer ~ and keep doing it anyway?8 Martin Lindstrom (in Buyology) verified that warning labels, even the gruesome visual ones, on cigarette packs triggered nicotine cravings. It makes sense (as David Lipsky pointed out in The Parrot and the Igloo) the same PR firms which brought us tobacco denial were involved in climate denial. As Cait Flanders said (in The Year of Less), “There is something to be said about being totally self-aware and still choosing to do what you know is bad for you.” The more addicted, the less principled. That’s why America is the cannibal of the world.
I am as misanthropically cynical ~
if not more so ~ than the next guy. 1955 was a long time ago and buses, representing public
transportation, seem positively archaic. (The main reason Blacks can sit in
front now is because all the whites have cars. And at least five parking spots
for each one.) If marching works so well, why all the stagnant wages
and ‘flexible’ schedules and shitty healthcare and rising illiteracy and
obesity and everything else wrecking the ozone? Oh, that’s right ~ everyone is staring at little TV sets instead. As Nietzsche put it, “[I]s it really to the people that we should entrust politics in order that they may thereby have their daily intoxication?” Who the hell elected Trump
anyway?9
Let me rant about my neighbors for
a moment. Even though they have a ‘fuel efficient’ car parked outside, these
millennials receive daily deliveries from Amazon Prime (among others). And
check out the shared recycling bin intended for four units. These two
characters fill it 75% up with the effluvia of their copious purchases within a
day. Three shopping days later, there are further deposits of boxes within
boxes bulging upwards like some monstrous Dr. Seuss tower, bulging up the bin
lid. That’s until the winds start whipping the precariously-placed contents
around. Then the effluvia spreads. There’s bubble-pack covering the steps to
the basement washer-dryer and cans of ‘organic soda’ flapping around the
bushes. A pizza box has migrated into somebody else’s yard. The wrapper to a
yoga mat lodges into the stairs leading to my studio apartment. A used yoga mat
whips around the parking lot. Whole Foods sacks have tumbled across the street.
Supposedly, every American produces 4.4 pounds of trash daily10 but
I think my neighbors surpass 10 pounds. And this before they’ve even approached
home-owning, kid-breeding middle-age.
I notice something curious about
these assholes. Oh, right. They’re me and my wife 25 years ago.
And today me ~ a reproving no-fun zone ~ was, no doubt, some
bicycle-pedaling, patched-jean, composting far-left wacko we ridiculed
on the few occasions we ever pried our fat asses out of our
Blockbuster-watching ‘organic cotton’ sofa to take a walk through the
neighborhood.11 What did we call him? Bumpersticker Man? Compost Guy maybe. Then
we hit the big time in the dot com bubble so we got our own house in a
‘better neighborhood’ and never saw the loser again. Once we had our first kid,
our consumption really went through the ozone layer. It was for junior’s
sake!12 Not that we were entirely selfish, mind you. We voted for Al Gore.
I remember what we said back then.
If you don’t like McDonalds, don’t eat there. If you think cars are bad, don’t
drive one. If you don’t like the way we live, go fuck yourself.
I used to believe in ‘collective
action’ and ‘building social movements’ and all that jazz. Dig how well that’s
been going. And, however greenwashed, magical Marxist thinking fails to
turn me on anymore (apologies, Kōhei Saitō). How about geoengineering schemes?
More technology to undo our technology? According to David Wallace-Wells (The
Uninhabitable Earth), 50% of all carbon emissions have been produced
in the last 25 years (when ‘capture’ or some ‘renewables’ gimmick
would help us get it together).13 Nope. All that new crap has to get
yanked out of the earth, too. As Sandra Goldmark (Fixation) noted, “[S]olar panels on the roof are great, but they don’t really matter if a company’s core business model [is] always selling more new stuff.” Besides, turbines don’t manufacture turbines.14
The fact is, our society is
intransigently individualistic. Climate change connects us all externally but
we’re all internally disconnected. An autistic society hooked on the Jevons
Paradox. Invoking the language of addiction, Bill McKibben (in The End of
Nature), compares humanity’s ransacking of eons’ worth of fossil fuels,
in geological time, to “one fantastic week’s debauch.” ‘Collective’ awareness of
our self-defeating gratifications, like our ideology, is measured by ever-shifting individual
archaeologies and time-lines. Imagine me asking the school board to stop getting all their school supplies from Amazon Prime. Then imagine me walking over to my neighbors’ door,
barging in on their bender and suggesting buying less stuff. It would take
Chairman Mao to make them change their slovenly, selfish practices before
they’re good and ready. Been there, done that. I know how addiction
works and interventions usually don’t work because change is possible only once
the addict has decided to change their dumbass behavior.
Reading recreational revolutionaries, some of them hip, young and ‘sustainable,’ they assert life will be better once ‘workers take direct control of production.’ Cool! But replace the word ‘workers’ with ‘Trump voters’ and there’s an argument against ‘direct control,’ if not democracy itself. What if ecological devastation is what ‘the people’ want? There are presently 8 billion people on Earth. Only 1.5 of them have cars. If Democracy is affluence, as the market understands it, then capitalism has many more ‘boats to raise.’ Or cars to roll off assembly lines. As it was originally conceived and executed, Democracy wasn’t universal. It was more of a shareholder shuck camouflaged by sentimental pretenses of ‘equal opportunity.’ It always required somebody to be poor, someone to be disenfranchised. If ‘opportunity’ becomes truly universalized and all 8 billion people get to own and operate motor vehicles, the planet and everyone living on it will be screwed. Democracy, as the free market understands it, is suicidal.
As easy is it to demonize the rich,
I don’t want to fetishize ‘the poor.’ As far as I can tell (and, as a public
education employee, I have daily contact with ‘the poor’), they are no less
short-sighted and greedy as rich people. They’re definitely more desperate,
sure, and they’re quicker to cite ‘what’s fair’ ~ not that I ever met any of
them agitating for ‘what’s fair’ for the poor slobs in Indonesia
mass-manufacturing their Dollar Store crap, then shipping it back three months
later as trash. I recall Nietzsche asking, “Are you
accomplices in the current folly of the nations, the folly of wanting above all
to produce as much as possible and to become as rich as possible?”
Coming primarily from the middle class, ‘The Left’ historically has been fascinated with ‘the poor.’ There’s always been something paternal, even supercilious, about this romance. Activists and radicals have viewed (what was once known as) ‘proletarians’ as a raw material to be led (like children) to further ‘progressive’ goals ~ implicitly acknowledging these two classes’ goals are not entirely aligned. The ugly resurgence of Trump dispels any illusion that ‘progressives’ and ‘the poor’ are united against ‘the rich,’ let alone the economic system which produces ‘the rich.’ That is because ‘progressives’ ~ just like ‘the poor’ ~ are wedded to capitalism. From what I can tell, ‘the poor’ aren’t going to boycott anything. ‘The poor’ don’t give a damn about ocean acidification. ‘The poor’ could care less if their Nikes are assembled in places like Rana Plaza. I can’t say I blame them. It would take a lot of white-privilege nerve to suggest they subscribe to voluntary poverty when their lives are defined by involuntary poverty. They’re not my comrades. This isn’t their hassle. Their karma is their problem, not mine. I’m not having an insurrection against their consumption. I’m having an insurrection against mine.
So how did that one-day mass
boycott go? According to Forbes, “Despite calls for an ‘economic
blackout’ targeting major retailers on February 28th, early data reveals Amazon
sales actually increased during the boycott period.” Yeah, my neighbors pitched
in. That is, another Amazon Prime truck stopped by. And I noticed the boycott
didn’t have the courage to try a Saturday. It’s not about picking one day,
people. It’s about slowing the hell down ~ permanently. Meanwhile the New
York Times reported that the boycott organizer is a registered sex criminal
~ uh, bummer.
What’s it to me? I can’t change my
neighbors, or anyone else. Nothing less than Green Stalinism could put a dent
in our collective rapacious habits and, lucky for everybody, ol Uncle Joe ain’t
here to bust anyone’s buzz. And, theoretical person reading this (probably
preparing a quick putdown for the comment box), I can’t change you. I don’t
even know you. All I can do is protest myself. To hell with X. Up
against the wall, Amazon Prime. Wash dishes by hand. Read a library book. Use
the internet at the library. Go without air-conditioning.15 Take a bus to the
grocery store. Figure out how to walk to work. Hard pass on insurance and debt. Have dinner (vegetarian) at home.16 No more coffee-to-go. Screw
getting a Christmas tree next year. Stop Christmas shopping entirely. The more
stuff we buy from the capitalists, the more time we have to work for them. Sock
it to those assholes!
Yeah, I know. That won’t
‘Save the planet.’ But it might save my soul.
According to Naomi Klein, “[T]he answer to the question ‘What can I, as an individual, do to stop climate
change’ is: nothing.”17 We could say the same thing about boycotts.
Or protests. Let’s ‘build a movement.’ Let’s ‘educate the working class.’ Let’s
throw teddy bears at the pigs in Seattle. Been there, done that. When these all-or-nothing ‘mobilizations’ fizzle out, everyone gets bummed out and goes home, impotent. It’s waiting
for divine intervention. As I see it, Trump is proof that God doesn’t give a
shit. And, most likely, the neighbors don’t either. Thanks to ‘connecting’ on the internet, people are more atomized than ever. Waiting for some
‘grassroots action’ is a bit of planning to quit smoking ~ next month. Like
recycling bins that only encourage continued consumption,18 it lets
us off the hook. However small, though, every time I don’t buy it, I get that dopamine hit. Even if it’s just a can of Coke. My over-consumption is worse than that of some corporate
entity or billionaire bastard because I can do something about mine.19
Some people need the comradeship of
AA, others kick alone.20 I don’t know about you but I’m on my own.
Like Nietzsche, I combat solipsistic addiction with individual
accountability. “Verily, he who possesseth little is so much the less possessed: Blessed be moderate poverty!”
1.
Bezos: “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two
pillars: personal liberties and free markets. … Viewpoints opposing those
pillars will be left to be published by others.”
2.
It was Charlie Manson who demonstrated how quickly an X can be turned into a
swastika.
3.
I’ll start with myself. I had three self-published books printed by and made
commercially available by KDP. One actually sold units! I unpublished them the
day I heard about Bezos’ suppression of Washington Post editorials. I
murdered my vanity to withdraw from the addiction economy which props up
these technofeudal lords. There are remaining copies at the public library,
however. And a couple under my bed (I think). What the hell, according to Iris
Gottlieb (Trash Talk), half of all books published end up unsold anyway.
4.
Let’s not forget Mark Zuckerberg who discontinued fact checking from Facebook
in tribute to Trump’s love of ‘alternative facts.’ Zuckerberg said Meta would
also “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender
that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.” Plus he handed a million
dollars to Trump for his inauguration party.
5. Sorry, I don’t wanna hear about ‘jobs’ and ‘hurting the workers.’ Quitting smoking makes somebody unemployed, and so what.
6.
And I say this with a public education take-home of only $28,000.
7. As Tiantiana Schlossberg points out in Inconspicuous Consumption, 80% of all internet traffic is videos, which represents the most general-use carbon-intensive online activity. Bitcoin and other data-mining scams, of course, are far worse.
9.
I’ve only met one person who admitted to voting for Trump in 2024. She was an
RN briefly employed by the middle school where I work. The main thing I recall
about her is she worked several jobs to support a high-consumerist lifestyle:
mortgaged home, heated pool, recreational vehicle for long-distance vacations
(Vegas included), the latest iPhone, even a ‘self-cleaning’ automated kitty
box. Although she was matriarch of a mixed race household and considered
herself a ‘working stiff’ (averaging 80 hours a week), she was gung-ho on
plundering the global South and annexing Greenland in search of more extraction
resources to keep getting off. Why wouldn’t she support Trump?
10. Wasteland by Oliver Franklin-Wallis.
12. According to Rob Hengeveld (Wasted World), global population is estimated to reach 10 billion in a couple decades and global resource capacity will then max out. This impending exigency seriously challenges the individual ego trip of ‘starting a family.’ However, as he puts it, “Population control by famine, drought, genocide or wars fought over remaining resources is worse than … changing our attitudes and customs themselves.”
13. “Hedging on future technnologies or corporations is a sympton,” explains Tad Delay (in Future of Denial). “An old, critical flaw in human group behavior: the fantasy that there’s a subject-supposed-to-know with solutions mapped out.” Perversely enough, turning science into a religion. “[T]he notion that we can rapidly achieve even more technological and cultural changes that we have consistently failed to make over the past three decades continues to be more plausible than the idea that the world’s citizens could be persuaded to buy a little less stuff” adds J.B. MacKinnon (The Day the World Stopped Shopping). I might also add that the exponential increase in emissions began shortly after the U.S.S.R. collapsed ~ and the internet became popular.
14. As Sarah Gobbot and Jan Zalasieicz (Discarded) point out, wind turbine blades, with an average age of only 25 years, are made out of plastic. “At the end of their lives, the turbine blades simply end up in landfill sites.”
15. Eric Dean Wilson (After Cooling) observed there were “decades of public resistance” to accepting air-conditioning when it was initially invented and marketed. “[M]ost people thought that cooling air for personal comfort was too strange, if not outright unhealthy.” Interestingly, the “upper classes” particularly disdained it.
16. According to Hope Jahren (The Story of More), 33% of Americans’ total calories come from restaurants.
17.
Earlier, in the same book (On Fire), Klein promotes a cult of Greta
Thunberg and how she inspired “a movement” (which sorta undermines her
argument). So, here we have, tediously again, free will versus determinism.
According to Amitav Ghosh (The Great Derangement), individual acts of
reduced consumption represent a “politics of sincerity” that “accept[s]
neo-liberal premises.” I would posit instead that totalitarian solutions accept
the ‘neo-liberal’ top-down ticket. Later in his screed, Ghosh finds “promising
development” in Pope Francis (!) taking a stance on climate change. Which is
it, charismatic leaders or global masses? Nope. Once again, it’s the old
story of leaders and followers in a traditional hierarchy.
18.
Consumed by Aja Barber.
19. Joel Bakan (The New Corporation) cites activist Stacy Mitchell disparaging product boycotts and service cancellations as such actions “keep us in [a] consumer mindset [and] render us powerless.” Instead, she says, people “need to confront [corporate abuses of power] in legal and policy domains.” So, it’s “citizens’ political action” that’s required. Sounds great! Except, I might ask, what does that mean? How does that work? In the following chapter, Bakan recounts all the sleazy ways Big Tech gained “considerable power to control government agendas” (primarily during Obama’s time in office). What I want to know is, if boycotts aimed at resisting corporate abuses of power are doomed to failure, why would petitioning government go any better? I mean, has it gone better? Since the New Deal anyway.
20.
According to Tim Kasser (The High Price of Materialism), those with a
“strong materialistic value orientation” were more likely to abuse substances.
In 2024, the United States ranked 23rd in the world for happiness, its lowest ranking ever in the annual World Happiness Report, down from 15th place in 2023. And suicide is the leading cause of global death; so much for the joys of ‘growth’ and industrial development. As Richard Seymore points out (in The Twittering Machine), “To break an
addiction … is a unique act of reinvention. It requires a creative leap. … It
is a process of becoming different.” Does that necessarily mean socialism? I’m all for libraries and the postal service. Throw in medical coverage, too! But after 13 years at Twin Oaks Intentional Community, I can’t say I’m a big fan of somebody else’s conception of socialism. My objection to socialism is similar to my objection to capitalism: herd mentality. Put colloquially, however, ‘becoming different’ might mean replacing “blackout purchases” (Flanders’ phrase) with tangible new interests, such as pursuing hobbies (for
less social people) or community interactions (for more social people). To
simplify a powerful idea of Nietzsche, experiencing boredom (instead of
smothering it) is a pre-requisite to creativity. There’s too much money in the hands of people with too little imagination.
©
2025 C. Kurtz.